Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

The early morning was her time. She could sense the approach of day and always rose before the sun did, waking half an hour ahead of dawn in order to walk up onto the mountain. Behind their warm, cosy little shack, kept so clean that it positively gleamed, a stony track with yellow flowers along its edges wound its way up the slope. Crumbs of stone scattered downwards from under her feet, and in the few minutes it took to reach the summit Sasha sometimes fell several times, bruising her knees.

Lost in thought, Sasha wiped the damp breath of night off the window ledge with her sleeve. She had been dreaming of something gloomy, dark and bad, something that cancelled out the entire carefree life she had now, but the final traces of her alarming visions evaporated with the first touch of the cool wind on her skin. And now she couldn’t be bothered to remember what had distressed her so badly in her dream. She had to hurry to the summit to greet the sun and then hurry home, slithering down the track – to cook breakfast and wake her father, to pack the bundle for his journey. And then, while he was hunting, Sasha would have the whole day to herself, and she could chase the clumsy dragonflies and flying cockroaches through the meadow flowers, as yellow as the patterned panels in the Metro carriages.

She tiptoed across the squeaky floorboards, opened the door a crack and laughed quietly.

It was years since Sasha’s father had seen such a happy smile on her face, and he hated the idea of waking her up. His leg had swollen and gone numb. The bleeding hadn’t stopped at all. They said that bites from the wandering dogs didn’t heal.

Should he call her? But he’d been away from home for more than twenty-four hours – before he went to the garages, he’d decided to visit one of the high-rise, concrete-panel termite nests two blocks away from the station, clambered up to the sixteenth floor and then passed out. And all that time Sasha hadn’t slept a wink – his daughter never went to sleep until he came back from his ‘stroll’. ‘Let her rest,’ he thought. ‘It’s all lies. Nothing’s going to happen.’ He would have liked to know what she was seeing in her dream right now. He could never completely escape, even in his dreams. Only very rarely did his subconscious release him for a couple of hours for a visit to his carefree youth. Usually he was forced to wander through the familiar dead houses with their scrapedout interiors, and a good dream was one in which he suddenly discovered an untouched apartment full of appliances and books that had somehow miraculously survived intact. As he fell asleep, he always asked to be taken back into the past. He longed most of all to find himself in that time when he had just met Sasha’s mother: when he was only twenty years old and already commanded the garrison of the station, which all its inhabitants still thought of as a temporary refuge, not the general barracks for a slave-labour mine in which they were serving a life sentence.

But instead of that he was tossed back into the more recent past, into the thick of those events five years ago. To the day that had sealed his fate and – even more terribly – his daughter’s fate. In his rational mind he had accepted his defeat and his exile, but he only had to fall into a doze for his heart to start demanding revenge.

Once again he was standing in front of a line of his soldiers with their Kalashnikovs at the ready – in that situation, the Makarov pistol to which his officer’s rank entitled him was worse than useless, except perhaps to shoot himself. Apart from the twenty or so machine-gunners behind his back, there was no one left at the station who was still loyal to him.

The crowd surged and seethed, growing larger and larger, swaying the barrier to and fro with dozens of hands. Then, at a flourish of some invisible conductor’s baton, the ragged hubbub swelled into a coordinated chorus. So far they were only demanding his dismissal, but in another minute they would want his head.

This was no spontaneous demonstration: it was the work of provocateurs sent in from the outside. At this stage it was pointless even trying to identify them and liquidate them one by one. The only thing he could do now to halt the rebellion and maintain his grip on power was order his men to open fire on the crowd. It still wasn’t too late for that.

His fingers clutched an invisible gun butt, the pupils of his eyes raced about under his swollen eyelids, his lips moved, uttering inaudible orders. The black puddle he was lying in spread wider and wider by the minute, as if it was drawing energy from his departing life.

‘Where are they?’

Jerked out of the dark waters of oblivion, Homer started flapping about like a perch caught on a bright spinner, gasping convulsively and gaping at the brigadier with wild, crazy eyes. The massive, cyclopean bulks of the twilight guardians of Nagornaya were still there, crowding together in front of his eyes, reaching out to him with those long, articulated fingers that could easily tear off his leg or crush his ribs. They surrounded the old man every time he closed his eyes, and they melted away slowly and reluctantly when he opened them again. Homer tried to jump to his feet, but the hand that was gently squeezing his shoulder turned back into the steely hook that had dragged him out of his nightmare. Gradually moderating his breathing, he focused on the face furrowed with scars, on the dark eyes that glimmered with an oily mechanical glint… Hunter? Alive? The old man cautiously turned his head to the left, then to the right, afraid of finding himself back at the bewitched station.

No, they were in the middle of a clear, empty tunnel – the fog that blanketed the approaches to Nagornaya was barely even noticeable here. Hunter must have carried him for almost half a kilometre, Homer calculated feverishly. Feeling calmer now, he allowed himself go limp, but still asked again, to make sure:

‘Where are they?’

‘There’s no one here. You’re safe.’

‘Those creatures… Did they attack me? Knock me out?’ The old man grimaced and rubbed the smarting lump on the back of his head.

‘I hit you. I had to, to stop your hysterics. You could have shot me, firing like that.’

Hunter finally released his vice-like grip, straightened up stiffly and ran one hand along his broad officer’s belt. On the opposite side from the holster with his Stechkin revolver was a leather case, with some purpose that wasn’t clear. The brigadier clicked a button and took out a flat copper flask. He shook it, opened it and took a large swallow, without offering Homer any. Then he squeezed his eyes shut for a second, apparently in pleasure. The old man felt a chilly shudder when he saw that the brigadier’s left eye couldn’t even close properly.

‘But where’s Ahmed? What happened to Ahmed?’ asked Homer, suddenly remembering and starting to shake again.

‘He’s dead,’ the brigadier said indifferently.

‘He’s dead,’ the old man repeated resignedly.

When the monster tore his comrade’s hand out of his, Homer had realised no living soul could ever wriggle out of those claws. He’d just been lucky that Nagornaya’s choice had not fallen on him. The old man looked round again – somehow he couldn’t believe straight away that Ahmed had disappeared forever. Homer looked at his own palm – it was torn and bleeding. He hadn’t been able to hold on. He suddenly felt short of air.

‘But Ahmed knew he was doomed,’ he said quietly. ‘Why did they take him, and not me?’

‘There was a lot of life in him,’ the brigadier replied. ‘They feed on human lives.’

‘It’s not fair,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘He’s got little children, he still has so much to live for! He had… And I’m just a wanderer, tumbleweed.’